CRAWFORDSVILLE
There is an ineffable charm about an old town that has outlived its
ambition to be a great city, and Crawfordsville is a fine type of such
a place. The region was settled in 1823, and the Montgomery County
people, both farmers and townfolk, have long been counted among the
sturdiest and most intelligent in the State. A cultivated society has
always existed at Crawfordsville, and as the seat of Wabash College it
acquired in its youth an academic air that it has never shaken off.
The town has been called “The Hoosier Athens,” by envious and less
favored neighbors. The analogy is not wholly fortunate, as there are
neither porticoes nor statues on the college campus, and no Cimon found
occupation here, as at the elder Athens, in tree-planting. Nature had
anticipated the need of “groves of academe,” and the trees about the
college and through the town are truly of the forest primeval, giving
the agreeable impression of a _rus in urbe_. Crawfordsville has often
sent young men elsewhere to find occupation; but if its commercial
attractions have been slight, its educational advantages have been
proportionately great, and Wabash is able to point to a long list of
successful alumni. The spirit of change has rarely invaded the college,
and men are now holding chairs who have grown old in its service.
Wabash has been content to do honest college work and has never made
false pretensions as to its ability to do more. “Mere literature,” as
Bagehot fondly called it, has not been disregarded, and in no college
of ampler endowment have the classics been taught more sympathetically
or intelligently. It is one of the few colleges remaining at the West
which close their doors to women, although importunate hands have long
besought the wicket.
The honor and dignity of learning have come to have a real meaning
here, not only to those who seek instruction at the college, but to the
people of the town as well. Wabash may not have directly influenced
those who made Crawfordsville a seat of authorship, but certainly a
fortunate chance led makers of books to seek the congenial atmosphere
created by the college. In such a place one may not grow rich, but one
may dwell contented; and while coarser commerce has not flourished
greatly, much valuable manuscript has freighted the east-bound mails
from Crawfordsville. Authorship and scholarship alone have not engaged
the inhabitants. Joseph E. McDonald, later a senator in Congress, once
lived here, as did also John M. Butler, who became McDonald’s law
partner at Indianapolis and one of the ablest men of the Western bar.
Butler’s son, John Maurice Butler, was born at Crawfordsville, and his
untimely death (1896) removed the man of most charming personality,
and the keenest wit of his generation at the capital. Henry Beebee
Carrington had identified himself with Indiana’s participation in
the War of the Rebellion before he became (1870-1873) professor of
military science at Wabash. His stay at Crawfordsville was brief,
but the inhabitants prefer to believe that as he once breathed the
Athenian air they are entitled to share with Connecticut, his native
State and later home, in the credit for his writings. The Whitlocks and
the Elstons were among the first settlers, and were prominent in all
the earlier labors of the community. Henry S. Lane, General Wallace’s
brother-in-law, was a senator in Congress (1860-1867), and lived and
died here.
I. _General Lew Wallace_
General Lew Wallace, whose varied achievements have contributed so
largely to the town’s fame, was not born at Crawfordsville, but at
Brookville, in Franklin County, April 10, 1827. His father, David
Wallace, had resigned from the regular army soon after his graduation
from West Point in 1821. He studied law at Brookville, and soon began
an interesting public career. He was one of the political giants of
the State in his day, holding many offices and positions of honor.
His first wife, General Wallace’s mother, was the daughter of John
Test, of a family long prominent in the State. General Wallace was an
adventurous boy, impatient of all restraint, and fond of wandering,
and he therefore received little systematic education; but his father
owned an excellent library, and, as has happened with other boys who
have refused to submit to the schoolmaster, he found his own way to
the book shelves. He was for a time a student at Hoshour’s school at
Centerville; and he once ran away to join an older brother at Wabash;
but he was either unwilling or unable to break his nomadic habits,
and continued to roam the woods until, at sixteen, his school bills
were audited for the last time. He was beset by several ambitions;
literature, art, and a military career invited him. He had some skill
at sketching, and painted a portrait of Black Hawk, the Indian chief,
drawing on the family medicine chest for castor oil to use in mixing
his colors. He also completed a novel, “The Man at Arms: A Tale of
the Tenth Century,” of which he remembers little; but Sulgrove in one
of his chronicles darkly hints that it was of the school of G. P. R.
James. Robert Duncan, clerk of Marion County, in which Indianapolis
is situated, employed him as copyist, and he varied this prosaic
occupation by reading law in his father’s office. The Mexican War now
broke upon the country, and as Lewis--the second syllable disappeared
during the Civil War--had painted a picture and written a romance, he
now turned naturally to his third ambition. He organized a company and
went south with the First Indiana Infantry. The regiment saw little
of the war, but the campaign and his personal experience in military
matters confirmed young Wallace’s purpose to write a novel of Mexico,
for which, by a kind of prevision and the inspiration of Prescott,
he had already made tentative sketches. On his return to Indiana he
again took up the law, and practised at Covington until 1852, when
he removed to Crawfordsville, which has ever since been his home.
He presently organized a military company, known as the “Montgomery
Guards,” and equipped it with the Zouave uniform. This furnished an
outlet for his ceaseless energy, and also for his pocket-book, as the
State contributed nothing to the company’s support. He brought it to
a high standard of efficiency, and at the outbreak of the Civil War
it was one of the best-drilled military organizations in the country.
Governor Morton appointed Mr. Wallace adjutant-general of the State
at the first sign of hostilities, but he served in this capacity for
a short time only, and organized the Eleventh Indiana Regiment, with
his original Crawfordsville company as nucleus, and began an active
and brilliant career in the army. Almost immediately his regiment
distinguished itself in West Virginia. He was a brigadier-general
before the capture of Fort Henry, and was made major-general for
gallantry at Donelson. A year after Shiloh, a friend called General
Wallace’s attention to the official reports of that engagement, and he
learned for the first time that he had been censured for his conduct on
the first day of the battle. He asked at once for a court of inquiry,
which was denied, and a long controversy followed. This died out for
a time, but was renewed when Grant began the serial publication of
his memoirs. It was always maintained by General Wallace’s friends
that Grant was unjust to Wallace; that the Indiana officer faithfully
obeyed orders actually given him; and certainly no one who ever had
any acquaintance with General Wallace would believe him capable of
intentionally taking a circuitous route to a battle-field. The
effective service of his command on the second day of the battle
should forever have stilled criticism; as it was, Grant wrote in his
memoirs--the last words that ever came from his pen--a footnote to his
account of Pittsburg Landing that fairly acquitted General Wallace of
all blame. Much has been written, by participants and others, touching
the incident, and it has been made the subject of an exhaustive study
by George F. McGinnis.[43] While stationed at Baltimore, in 1864,
General Wallace prevented a Confederate descent upon Washington by
intercepting Jubal Early at Monocacy. He threw 6,000 men against
Early’s force of 28,000, suffering defeat, but detaining the enemy
until Grant could send reënforcements from Virginia. This was one of
the most important of all his military services, and he received for it
Grant’s cordial praise. General Wallace was a member of the court that
tried the conspirators implicated in the assassination of Lincoln; and
he was president of the commission that tried and convicted Captain
Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison.
When General Wallace returned to Crawfordsville at the close of the
war he was thirty-eight; he had served creditably in one war and
with enviable distinction in a second, and he turned to the arts of
peace from a military experience that had given him wide reputation
and acquaintance among public men of the Civil War period. He began
industriously to reëstablish himself in his law practice, and varied
his occupation with study and literary work. “The Man at Arms,” his
youthful attempt at “A Tale of the Tenth Century,” had disappeared
during his absence in Mexico; but the ambition to write a romance
of the invasion of Cortez, and his manuscript beginnings of it, had
survived two wars, and he now set about finishing the story. He had
at this time no definite ambition to become an author, and he gave
his evenings to the writing of “The Fair God” with little idea of
ever publishing it. After its completion he carried it East with him
on a business journey. Whitelaw Reid gave him an introduction to a
Boston publisher, and the result was the appearance of the tale in
1873. He had spent in all about twelve years on the book, part having
been written, as already stated, in his boyhood; and the author’s
faithfulness to his early purpose through many years that had brought
new duties and obligations is in keeping with his whole character.
The scenes of “The Fair God” were unfamiliar to the novel reader, and
the very names in the book were somewhat disconcerting; but the tale
was received in the beginning with a fair degree of interest, and it
has ever since enjoyed a steady sale. The subsequent success of “Ben
Hur” directed attention anew to General Wallace’s earlier tale, but
the romance was something more than an amateur effort, and time has
not diminished its entertaining qualities. As a picture of Aztecan
civilization it is accurate, and the incidents are related in an
orderly and natural manner that holds the attention. The devotion of
the people to their religion is impressive; but the tale is essentially
a military romance. The battle scenes following the appearance of
Cortez and his Spaniards are described with an animation and an
amplitude that impart to the reader the sense of beholding a series of
great spectacles. The book is rich in those surprises which it is the
business of the romancer to produce; and the chapters descriptive of
the battle towers (_mantas_) which were among the European’s resources,
and of the retreat of the invaders, are noisy with the clang of battle.
The prophecies of the mystic priest Mualox, who sees through the eyes
of a child the coming of the Spaniards, are interesting; and curiously
enough they had their origin in an incident of General Wallace’s own
experience in Indiana, showing how the imagination may play upon the
commonplace. When he lived at Covington, he formed the acquaintance
of a tailor who was deeply interested in the occult sciences, and who
once invited General Wallace to his shop to witness manifestations of
his powers. The tailor placed his apprentice under a kind of hypnotic
influence, and told General Wallace to take the boy’s hand and to
follow in his own mind some route with whose details he was familiar.
General Wallace obeyed, mentally reviewing a highway that led to the
house of a farmer client. The boy’s lips moved, and he coherently
described the road, and presently the farmhouse, just as General
Wallace saw them; then he abruptly ceased to follow the leader’s train
of thought. He said that it was night; that some one came out of the
house with a light, walked about inspecting the barnyard, and then
returned to the house. The boy had now become exhausted; the tailor
revived him, and General Wallace went on to his home. A few days
later, when the countryman whose farm had figured in the incident
came to town, General Wallace asked him if he had been at home at
the hour mentioned; he replied that he had been at home and asleep.
Further questioning elicited the statement that at about the time of
the experiment at the tailor shop he had been aroused by noises in the
barnyard, and that, fearing some marauder was after his fowls, he had
taken a light and gone out to see that all was secure.
The friendly reception of “The Fair God” did not awaken any unusual
interest in General Wallace as a writer. He continued at Crawfordsville
the life of a lawyer of polite tastes, keenly interested in politics.
“The Fair God” out of the way, he began almost immediately to cast
about for some new literary employment. In about 1874 it occurred
to him to write a novelette, whose principal incident should be the
meeting of the Wise Men in the Desert and the birth of Christ. The
brief account in the Gospels had long appealed to his imagination, and
he wrote what is now the first book of “Ben Hur,” intending to offer
it to some magazine for publication as a sketch, with illustrations.
While the manuscript still lay in his desk, he met on a railway journey
an old friend, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and in the course of
conversation the famous sceptic touched on the subject of Christianity.
General Wallace had always been indifferent in religious matters,
neither denying nor affirming; but Ingersoll’s downright iconoclasm
alarmed him. He determined to investigate the subject and form his
own conclusions; and he began researches and studies which continued
through five years. When he had concluded, he fully accepted the tenets
of Christian faith, and he had amplified his sketch of the Wise Men
into the novel “Ben Hur.” Continuous labor had not been possible during
the writing of this tale: he had been busy with everyday affairs;
politics received a share of his attention; and he became, in 1878, by
appointment of President Hayes, governor of New Mexico Territory. He
lived at Santa Fé for three years, and much of “Ben Hur” was written
in the governor’s house there. General Wallace had never visited
Palestine when he wrote “Ben Hur,” but there are points of resemblance
between the landscape of New Mexico and that of the Holy Land, and
these were of assistance. He procured a profile map of Palestine, and
was so attentive to topographical detail that later, when he visited
the scenes of his story in company with a recognized authority in
ancient history, every feature of the country as described in the book
was verified. An immense amount of labor is represented in this novel.
Many volumes were consulted in the search for antiquarian lore, that it
might lack nothing that would aid in conveying an accurate impression
of the period.
The book was capitally planned, striking episodes falling into place
naturally, and not too abundantly. The meeting of the Wise Men, the sea
fight, and the chariot race are dramatic to a degree; but the sombre
picture of the crucifixion is unmarred by excess. The reverence which
characterizes every mention of the Saviour is the author’s happiest
achievement in the story. The subject is difficult, but it is handled
with admirable taste and refinement. However, the book does not depend
for continued attention on its interest as a religious novel; it is
equally noteworthy for its comprehensive grasp of the politics of the
period, its picture of the various peoples that flowed through the
streets of Jerusalem and Antioch, and the suggestion of a romantic
commerce whose exploits lay in strange seas and beyond the deserts.
Nothing in the book is accomplished more skilfully than the slow
extinction of the idea of the coming of a great ruler of the world,
to rebuild the throne of Solomon, and the gradual acceptance of the
spiritual significance of Christ’s advent; and it may be taken, in
connection with the history of the novel, as a revelation of the growth
in the author’s own mind of a belief in the divine Saviour. Historical
novels, particularly those that look to antiquity for subjects, follow
necessarily certain traditions, and these are observed carefully by
General Wallace. Scott, more than any other, helped him, and “Ivanhoe,”
in particular, was his model. The writing in “Ben Hur” is uniformly
good, and the dialogue in archaic speech is well sustained. General
Wallace wrote out of an ample vocabulary enriched by the constant
reading of Oriental narrative, and in his descriptions the epithets
are always apposite. The success of “Ben Hur” was not immediate. It
sold slowly for several years, but it gained steadily in popularity
and continues in favor with the booksellers. It has been translated
into all the European languages, into Arabic and Japanese, and it is
accessible to the blind in raised-letter. The sale of the copyright
edition in America (1900) exceeds 1,200,000, which is probably
greater than that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Many playwrights and actors
proposed to General Wallace from time to time the dramatization of
“Ben Hur,” but he feared that the spirit of reverence, which he had
so consistently communicated to the novel, would be lost in any play
founded upon its incidents. He declined all offers until, in 1899, a
plan was submitted which met his approval, and in the fall of that
year the play was given its first presentation at New York.
When President Garfield appointed General Wallace minister to Turkey,
he wrote across his commission “Ben Hur.” General Wallace called at the
White House, just before leaving for his post, to pay his respects to
the President, and Garfield said to him: “I expect another book from
you. Your official duties will not be so onerous that you cannot write
it. Make the scene Constantinople.” The opportunity thus presented for
further literary work was a consideration in accepting the post. The
Turkish occupation of Constantinople is an incident of great historical
importance, and in his search for material for a new romance, General
Wallace determined to write a tale that should present a picture of
the fierce struggle between Christian and Moslem. His studies at
Constantinople led to the writing of “The Prince of India.” The Prince
is “The Wandering Jew.” He appears as a man of mysterious gifts, who
wields great wealth and power. He has discovered what he believes to
be common ground upon which all the spiritually minded may meet,
irrespective of religion. He appears before the Emperor Constantine and
presents his plan for a universal religious union, but he horrifies
the theologians, and finding the Christians unsympathetic, he turns
to Mohammed, and bestows upon him the sword of Solomon, the sign of
conquest, which he had found in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre. The
tale has neither the interest of “Ben Hur” nor the novelty and military
ardor of “The Fair God.” The subject required deliberate treatment,
and the hero, who is a scholar and a mystic, naturally deals in words
oftener than in actions.
General Wallace’s other writings are “The Boyhood of Christ” (1889),
and “The Wooing of Malkatoon: a Turkish Tale, with Commodus, a Play”
(1898), both in blank verse.
There is nothing in General Wallace’s literary career to encourage
hasty and careless workmanship. His methods have been, from the
beginning, those of a conscientious artist, who strives for excellence
and is capable of cheerfully casting aside the work of many days if,
by additional labor, he can gain better results. He parleys with a
sentence or debates with a synonym with a caution that is akin to
Oriental diplomacy. He has probably never written even a social letter
carelessly, and if his correspondence were to be collected, it would
prove to be of the same quality as his best printed work. There has
always been a dignity in his ambitions. Military leadership came to
him naturally, and when he took up literature, it was in a serious
way, with subjects that were new and daring. By making every stroke
count, and paying no heed to changing literary fashions, he has, in the
intervals of unusually varied and exacting employments, cultivated the
literary art with enviable success.
Heredity and environment explain nothing in General Wallace. He is an
estray from the Orient, whom Occidental conditions have influenced
little. This is proved by all his imaginative writing, by his military
tastes, by many qualities of his personality, and by his appearance
and bearing. He has never written of American life, and the attraction
of Mexico as a field for fiction lay in the splendor and remoteness
of the early civilization of the country, combined with the romance
of its conquest by soldiers of Spain. In like manner, “Ben Hur” and
“The Prince of India” are such subjects as would naturally appeal
to him. His fancy has delighted always in the thought of pageantry,
conquest, mystery, and mighty deeds; it has pleased him to contemplate
the formal social life of the old heroic times. The beginning of his
friendship with the Sultan illustrates a sympathy, native in him, with
the Oriental character. General Wallace had reached Constantinople
after his appointment as minister, but had not been formally received.
On Friday, the Moslem Sunday, he went with the multitude to see the
Sultan go to prayer. General Wallace was entitled, by act of Congress,
to wear the uniform of a major-general in the United States army, and
he was clad in all the regalia of the rank. Between the gate of the
imperial park and the Mosque which the Sultan attended was a small
house, with a platform in front of it, set apart to strangers, and
there General Wallace viewed the procession. The dark man in the rich
uniform attracted the attention of the Sultan as he passed, and from
the Mosque he sent Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, then marshal of
the palace, to learn the identity of the stranger. On finding that he
was the new American minister awaiting audience, the Sultan sent an
invitation to General Wallace to accompany him on his return to the
palace, an honor never before accorded to a minister not yet received.
A carriage was sent for the American, who returned in the brilliant
cortège next to the carriage of the Sultan. The reception at the palace
was particularly distinguished, and thereafter the relations between
the two were intimate and cordial. The Sultan often summoned the
minister to the palace, sometimes requesting interviews at the dead of
night. All their conversation was through an interpreter, as the Sultan
knew no English and General Wallace did not speak French.
There was early stamped upon General Wallace an air of authority that
went well with the military profession; but later years have softened
this into a courtliness and grace of manner wholly charming. The
Oriental strain in him has become more and more pronounced, suggesting
that the years spent in the study of Eastern history, and his actual
contact with Oriental peoples, have emphasized it.
Mrs. Wallace (born Susan Arnold Elston) is a native of Crawfordsville.
Her father was a pioneer of central Indiana. The homes of his
descendants are grouped in Elston Grove, one of the prettiest spots in
Crawfordsville. General and Mrs. Wallace were married in 1852, and she
is “the wife of my youth,” to whom “Ben Hur” was dedicated. He received
so many consolatory letters based on this inscription, which seemed to
be misunderstood, that in later editions he changed it, adding “who
still abides with me.” Mrs. Wallace began writing at an early age, both
prose and verse. She has never collected her poems, though several of
them, as “The Patter of Little Feet,” written years ago, are frequently
brought to the attention of a new audience by the newspapers. She has
printed one book of fiction, “Ginevra” (1887), and three books of
travel sketches, “The Storied Sea” (1884); “The Land of the Pueblos”
(1888); and “The Repose in Egypt” (1888). Mrs. Wallace has a happy
manner of describing places and incidents, and the papers in these
volumes show the spontaneity and ease of good letters, and are without
the guide-book taint. They were intended, as the author stated in the
preface to “The Storied Sea,” for patient, gentle souls seeking rest
“from that weariness known in our dear native land as mental culture.”
Mrs. Wallace shares her husband’s liking for Eastern subjects, and her
Egyptian and Turkish papers, in particular, are delightful reading.
II. _Maurice Thompson_
No other Indianian has lived so faithfully as Maurice Thompson a
life devoted to literary ideals, and none of his contemporaries
among writers of the West and South has been more loyally devoted to
pure _belles-lettres_ than he. Abstract beauty has appealed to him
more strongly than to any other writer of the Indiana group, and he
has expressed it in his poems, through media suggested by his own
environment, with charm and grace. He is a native of Indiana, having
been born at Fairfield, near Brookville, September 9, 1844. His father
was of Scotch-Irish ancestry; his maternal grandfather was of Dutch
origin; and both lines were represented in the Southwestern migration
at the beginning of the century. In Maurice’s childhood his father,
who was a Baptist clergyman, made several changes of residence, all
tending southward, removing first to southeastern Missouri, then to
Kentucky, and again within a few years to the valley of the Coosawattee
in northern Georgia. Here the senior Thompson became a planter, and
Maurice enjoyed thereafter, until he reached manhood, a life in
which the study of books was ideally blended with the freedom of the
country. He has always expressed great obligations to his mother’s
influences during these years; her literary tastes were sound, and
she imparted to her children the love of good books, overcoming by
her own encouragement and guidance the absence of schools in their
neighborhood. Tutors were procured for higher mathematics and the
languages; but the chief impulse to the study of the old literatures
lay in the youth’s own taste and temperament. Like Lanier, Hayne,
Esten Cooke, John B. Tabb, and others who were to become known in
literature, he entered the Confederate army (1862), and saw hard
service until the surrender. Even these years of soldier experience
did not interrupt wholly his studies, for he usually managed to carry
with him some book worth reading, the essays of De Quincey and Carlyle
belonging to this period. Mr. Thompson returned to his father’s
plantation at the close of the war, and remained there for three
years, continuing his studies as before, but substituting hard manual
labor for the life of pleasant adventure by field and flood that had
given him from boyhood into early manhood an intimate acquaintance
with wild things. He now began, of necessity, to accommodate himself
to the changed conditions of the community and of his own family. He
had studied engineering, and he perfected himself in it, and read law.
Reconstruction moved forward slowly, and wishing to get as quickly
as possible into a region where his material prospects could be
improved, he went to Crawfordsville, without fixed purpose, and found
employment with a railway surveying party. He supported himself by
engineering until he felt justified in taking up the law, in which
he was successful, and to which he was constant until the increase of
literary reputation and steady employment in more congenial labor made
it possible for him to abandon it. His marriage to a daughter of John
Lee, an influential citizen of the county, fixed him as a resident of
Crawfordsville, which has since remained his home. For a number of
years he was prominent in local politics. He sat once in the State
legislature, and he was appointed State geologist in 1885.
Mr. Thompson had written experimentally in boyhood, and after his
removal to Indiana he continued the cultivation of his gifts, and
beginning slowly, attained to an abundant production, in both prose
and poetry, that made him through many years the Western author whose
name most frequently occurred in the indices of the best magazines.
During his youth in the Cherokee country he had been initiated into
the mysteries of archery by a hermit who lived in the midst of a pine
forest near his home. Mr. Thompson and his brother, Will H. Thompson,
were both enthusiastic archers and hunters, and their adventures in the
wilds of Florida were full of romantic interest. The bow was with them
a kind of protest against the shot-gun, and assured a less murderous
extirpation of game. Their own skill with the primitive weapon was
remarkable, and as a recurrence of interest in the bow in this country
is not imminent, they may be considered the last of American archers.
Proficiency in this sport and the acquaintance with woodcraft to which
it led were important influences in Mr. Thompson’s first literary work.
In the seventies, a great revival in archery swept the country, and
this was wholly due to a series of articles on archery and on hunting
with the long bow which Mr. Thompson printed in the periodicals. These
papers were gathered into a book (1878), and although he had published
three years before a volume of sketches called “Hoosier Mosaics,” his
writings on this subject, with the attractive title “The Witchery of
Archery,” gave him his first footing as an author. The long bow has
again fallen into disuse, but the freshness and zest of those sketches
have not passed away. However, the archer had found in his woodlands
more important material than he had yet made use of; for while he
was following Robin Hood, he was also the servant of Theocritus and
Meleager, and he wrote at this period many lyrics that suggested, by
their spirit at least, the Greek pastoral poetry more than anything
in English. They were published under the descriptive title “Songs
of Fair Weather” (1883), and are included also in a larger volume of
Mr. Thompson’s verse, “Poems” (1892). E. S. Nadal writes[44] that he
has never known any scenery so classical as the glades which border
the forests of Ohio and Indiana. In fancy, he is able to people them
with figures of mythology, and in no other spots, he says, has his
imagination been equal to this task. It is pleasant to find this
comment running into a reference to Mr. Thompson: “When I was the
literary reviewer of a New York daily,” says Mr. Nadal, “I was always
on the lookout for the verses of a young poet who lived in this part of
the world. I remember that one of his poems related how that once when
Diana was at her bath in some clear spring, no doubt known to the poet,
a sort of sublimated Hoosier of the fancy, himself quite nude and
classic, passed near by. He quickly, however, ran away far through the
green thick groves of May,--
“‘Afeard lest down the wind of Spring
He’d hear an arrow whispering.’”
There is a great deal of the Indiana landscape to be found through
Mr. Thompson’s poems, though he often looks southward to the north
Georgia hills and to Florida. Servile descriptions he does not give,
but against backgrounds traced with great delicacy and beauty he throws
suddenly and for a moment only some fleeting spirit of the woodland.
There is in his language “the continual slight novelty” which is
indispensable in poetry that is to haunt and taunt the memory. As an
instance of his felicity a poem called “Before Dawn” may be cited:--
“A keen, insistent hint of dawn
Fell from the mountain height;
A wan, uncertain gleam betrayed
The faltering of the night.
“The emphasis of silence made
The fog above the brook
Intensely pale; the trees took on
A haunted, haggard look.
“Such quiet came, expectancy
Filled all the earth and sky:
Time seemed to pause a little space;
I heard a dream go by!”
Such subjects he always handles finely, leaving the thought in a spell
of mild wonder and awe, as if something beautiful had passed and
vanished. Similar effects were often possible with him in his younger
days; and it is a question whether the moods from which such work
proceeds recur after youth, the dream, has departed and taken that from
the heart which “never comes again.” Those early pieces could not have
been written by an indoors man; there is a refreshing quality of the
open air in every line of them. The note is unusual, and is perhaps
best sounded rarely; lightness and deftness are necessary to him who
would evoke its entire purity and melody. In “The Death of the White
Heron,” “A Flight Shot,” “Diana,” “The Fawn,” and “In the Haunts of
Bass and Bream,” he trusted his fortunes to rhymed couplets of eight
syllables, which are particularly well adapted to his purposes. The
last-named poem relates with tantalizing deliberation the taking of
a bass; the life of the stream pending the capture is described in
musical, transitional passages to the refrain,--
“Bubble, bubble, flows the stream,
Like low music through a dream.”
He again employs couplets in one of the most appealing of all this
series, “In Exile,” which is the prayer of an archer of the new world
that England, the mother of archers, will call him home. Later Mr.
Thompson essayed a number of poems in a flexible ode form, showing
a broadening of his powers and a widening of his personal horizons.
The flight in such pieces as “In Captivity” and “Before Sunrise” is
longer than in the earlier poems. It is a pleasure to find a poet
to whom America is so satisfactory as a field that he dares to set
up the mocking-bird against the nightingale. Mr. Thompson makes the
home-songster a medium for communicating the spirit and significance of
our democracy to our friends overseas. The movement through all these
poems is free and vigorous, and the irregular lines please by the happy
chance of the rhymes. The pleasant winds of which the poet writes
so refreshingly creep often into his measures. Patriotic subjects
he touches with nobility and fervor; and he became the laureate of
reconstruction when he penned his ringing poem “To the South,” the
conclusion of which must not be omitted here:--
“I am a Southerner;
I love the South; I dared for her
To fight from Lookout to the Sea,
With her proud banner over me.
But from my lips thanksgiving broke
As God in battle thunder spoke,
And that Black Idol, breeding drouth
And dearth of human sympathy
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South,
Was, with its chains and human yoke,
Blown hellward from the cannon’s mouth,
While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!”
Again, when invited to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa, of
Harvard, in 1893, he chose for his subject “Lincoln’s Grave,”
expressing, with greater care, similar feelings of loyalty, and
recounting Lincoln’s high qualities with eloquent appreciation.
Mr. Thompson has published a number of novels: “A Tallahassee Girl”
(1882); “His Second Campaign” (1882); “At Love’s Extremes” (1885);
“A Banker of Bankersville” (1886); “A Fortnight of Folly” (1888);
and “Stories of the Cherokee Hills” (1899), a volume of short tales
reminiscent of slave days and the author’s boyhood. “A Tallahassee
Girl” is a graceful and pretty story, the scene of which is laid at
the South, as is true also of the two tales that immediately followed
it. They convey distinct impressions of phases of Southern life in
the early post-bellum period, and abound in romantic color. “Alice of
Old Vincennes” (1900), is a captivating tale of the French period of
Indiana history, closing with the surrender of Vincennes to Clark. The
heroine is delightful, and Father Beret is a character worthy of Dumas.
The book shows in all ways a marked advance over any previous prose
work of this author. He has also written “The Boys’ Book of Sports”
(1886); and “Louisiana” (1888), in the Stories of the States series,
and “The Ocala Boy” (1885), all for juvenile readers. He has written
many essays in which some phase of literature has been observed from
the point of view of a nature-lover; and his touch in such instances
is always light and his matter bright and stimulating. Two volumes of
such papers have been collected, “By-ways and Bird Notes” (1885) and
“Sylvan Secrets” (1887). The scientist and the litterateur meet in
his discussions of the mind and memory of birds, and the anatomy of
bird-song; and his essay on Shakespeare, written within sound of the
Gulf of Mexico, to the accompaniment of the songs of mocking-birds, is
wholly characteristic of his independence in literary matters. He has
been one of the most courageous champions of the romantic as against
the analytic and realistic. He delivered at the Hartford Theological
Seminary, in 1883, a series of lectures dealing comprehensively with
the question of morality in literature, and he embodied these in a
volume, “The Ethics of Literary Art” (1883). Mr. Thompson became,
in 1889, literary editor of the New York _Independent_, reserving,
however, the privilege of continuing his residence at Crawfordsville.
His home, “Sherwood Place,” is on a quiet margin of the town, and the
house has stood for half a century shielded from the public eye by
native beeches and alien pines. Mr. Thompson’s life is wholly devoted
to study and writing. His instincts are thoroughly scholarly, and in
some directions, as in Greek poetry and Old French literature, where
long and loving study have given him special knowledge, he is an
authority. He has no complaints of the world’s treatment of him or his
work, and he declares that his writings have been received with much
more cordiality than they have deserved. He is exceedingly kind to
beginners in literature, and his criticisms have been of benefit to
many young Western and Southern writers. Wabash College conferred upon
him, in 1900, the degree of Doctor of Letters.
His brother, Will H. Thompson, was born in Missouri (1846), and the
experiences of their youth and early manhood were similar. Will
Thompson was a marvellous archer, and shared his brother’s enthusiasm
for hunting with bow and arrow. He has not been, in recent years, a
resident of Crawfordsville, having removed to the State of Washington,
but he wrote while in Indiana his “High Tide at Gettysburg,” one of
the few poems of the Civil War that has adequately expressed the spirit
of battle and the larger meaning of the conflict.
III. _Mary H. Krout_--_Caroline V. Krout_
Mary H. Krout, another Crawfordsville author, has added to the
distinction of an Indiana family in which an admiral, George Brown,
and several scholars and scientists have appeared. In her girlhood she
wrote the verses “Little Brown Hands,” which have enjoyed a vitality
not always relished by the author, whose later and longer flights are
better deserving of recognition. Miss Krout has been an indefatigable
traveller, and her books include “Hawaii and a Revolution” (1898), an
account of her personal experiences in the Sandwich Islands during
the political crisis that preceded annexation; also “A Looker-on in
London” (1899), which describes novel phases of English life freshly.
Miss Krout more recently penetrated to the interior of China, visiting
cities remote from the beaten track of travel. Her sister, Caroline V.
Krout, a classical scholar of high attainment, has written, under the
nom de plume “Caroline Brown,” “Knights in Fustian” (1900), a novel of
Indiana. The “knights in fustian” are “Knights of the Golden Circle,”
a treasonable society which menaced Indiana during the Civil War. The
principal characters are the fatuous rustics, who indulge their crude
taste for the mysterious in the secret meetings and sonorous ritual of
the society. Miss Krout knows the people of her own soil thoroughly,
and the particular type that has attracted her is set out in her pages
with photographic accuracy. The tale is true to history and to the
local life, and its literary excellence places the author’s name high
on the roll of Western writers. She has also written many short stories
for the periodicals.